The Anti-Pattern Organisation

Simon Wardley's doctrine is a set of principles that suit almost any organisation. This page shows what an organisation looks like when it ignores them: it fails to focus on user needs, use a common language, be transparent, challenge assumptions, remove duplication and bias, use appropriate methods, think small, think about aptitude and attitude, or provide purpose, mastery, and autonomy. It also fails to understand basic economic patterns, context-specific play, its own landscape, and strategy.

Fails to Focus on User Needs

It can't say who its users are or what they need. Ask, and you hear its own needs instead – revenue, profit, more customer data – described as if they were what its customers want.

Fails to Use a Common Language

Different groups describe the same problem in different ways: box-and-wire diagrams, business process diagrams, and stories. None of these is a map. A map, in Wardley's sense, is visual and specific to its context, and it shows components, their position relative to an anchor such as a user need, and how they are moving. Without one shared way to describe the landscape, groups talk past each other and their plans drift apart.

Fails to Be Transparent

Simple questions are hard to answer, such as how many projects are under way or which teams are building the same thing. Information sits in silos, and each group guards what it knows instead of sharing it.

Fails to Challenge Assumptions

Decisions follow fashion, the opinion of the most senior person in the room, or the latest management article. People can see the flaws but don't say so, and some teams will admit, if you ask, that they are building things they expect to fail.

Fails to Remove Duplication and Bias

There is far more duplication than anyone expects. Look closely and you find several teams building their own versions of the same thing, often something the market already sells as a commodity. Suggest using the commodity and you're told the work is unique, even though nobody can say which user need it meets.

Fails to Use Appropriate Methods

It applies one method everywhere, such as "outsource all of IT" or "use Agile everywhere". When that disappoints, it switches to the next one-size-fits-all method, often because it worked well in one case elsewhere (outcome bias). Different components need different methods: Agile for components in genesis, where you are still finding out what they are; Lean for products; and Six Sigma for commodities, where the aim is to reduce variation.

Fails to Think Small

It prefers big efforts and big departments: huge programmes that try to deliver everything at once, regular re-engineering of whole platforms, and one major reorganisation after another.

Fails to Think Aptitude and Attitude

It treats each aptitude, such as finance, operations, or IT, as one uniform skill. It talks about "IT" as a single thing instead of the many different kinds of work it contains, and it sends everyone on the same general course, such as "Agile training for all". It ignores attitude too. It expects the same people to pioneer new ideas, settle them into products, and town-plan them into commodities and utilities, even though pioneers, settlers, and town planners have different attitudes and suit different work.

Fails to Provide Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy

People are unclear about what the organisation is for, feel they have little control over their own work, and believe they can't influence what happens. Purpose, mastery, and autonomy are the three elements of intrinsic motivation that Daniel Pink describes in his book Drive. This organisation offers people none of them.

Fails to Understand Basic Economic Patterns

It runs efficiency programmes and innovation programmes as if they were unrelated, without seeing that when an activity becomes an efficient commodity, it becomes a base that new things are built on. It assumes it can choose whether to adopt a change such as cloud computing, when competition has already taken that choice away. And it doesn't see its own inertia: the resistance to change that comes from what made it successful in the past.

Fails to Understand Context-Specific Play

It has no shared language for discussing gameplay: the moves that work in one context but not in another. It repeats terms such as open source, ecosystem, and innovation as slogans, without knowing where each one applies.

Fails to Understand the Landscape

It doesn't know which components make up its own business or how they depend on each other. Often it can't even describe its own basic capabilities.

Fails to Understand Strategy

It says strategy is all about the why, but it can't tell apart the two kinds of why that Wardley describes: the why of purpose (why the organisation exists) and the why of movement (why move here rather than there). It rarely talks about where it stands or how the landscape is changing, so it can't say where it should act, and without that the why of movement has nothing to work with. Its strategy ends up as a list of actions copied from other organisations or taken from outside advisers.

Using the Anti-Patterns as a Check

Read each section and ask whether it describes your organisation, or part of it. The first nine are the reverse of doctrine principles, so the doctrine pages linked below tell you what to do instead. The last four come from a lack of situational awareness, which you build by mapping your landscape. If you recognise several, start with the Phase I principles, such as focusing on user needs, using a common language, and challenging assumptions.

Sources

Adapted from Simon Wardley, Wardley Maps, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Material adapted from these sources is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.